{"id":6773,"date":"2026-04-17T12:49:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T12:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/6773\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T12:49:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T12:49:17","slug":"abbyy-ai-with-a-purpose-starts-with-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/6773\/","title":{"rendered":"ABBYY: AI with a purpose starts with documents"},"content":{"rendered":"

ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson<\/a> has led the Document AI platform company for almost a decade now. He delivered his keynote at ABBYY Ascend (hereafter written as Abbyy) 2026 in Nashville this year to an audience of customers, partners and practitioners at all levels. Techzine attended on a mission to understand where the company has come from (with its roots in optical character recognition OCR)\u2026 and gain a first-hand grasp on where the organisation\u2019s Document AI platform goes next in the era of AI.<\/p>\n

Persson and team say that document-heavy workflows still power many businesses at the backend. To address the reality of modern documentation data, Abbyy spans purpose-built Document AI models and domain-specific<\/a> vision language models (VLMs) that enable agents to read, interpret and act on business-critical documents with accuracy and confidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The company says that high-quality document intelligence is transforming workflows across finance, operations, compliance<\/a> and customer experience. Talking about how Document AI fits into the wider world of intelligence<\/a>, Persson says that Abbyy has \u201creally transformed from the bottom up\u201d and that evolution has happened in order to prepare for operations in today\u2019s cloud-native enterprise stack.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have in our DNA a solid reputation for profitable growth, but why does that matter? It means that we don\u2019t need anyone else to support our development (although yes, we are private equity owned, we are masters of our own destiny)\u2026 so today we spend about 25% of all our revenues on R&D to evolve our platform,\u201d said Persson. \u201cSo, looking at how we leverage AI today, it means that we can do more and do better, and that progression translates directly to our customers also being able to do more and work in a more agile way, whatever their industry vertical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Code is not the moat\u00a0<\/p>\n

Persson says that code alone is no longer the competitive differentiator that it used to be. His favoured term is that code is not the moat i.e. some surrounding blocking factor that draws a perimeter of limitations around any given software project. What matters is how an enterprise software company actually delivers and how securely it does so on the road ahead, all while keeping open to the optionality of the next AI services, which are surely around the corner.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a market perspective, the concept of intelligent document processing (IDP) came at the back of the robotic process automation (RPA) revolution, when the technology itself became popular. What happens now is a question of how AI-powered IDP will take on a deeper meaning and perhaps evolve (or even disappear and be subsumed into an abstracted service) to take a new role in enterprise software,\u201d said Persson.<\/p>\n

Agentic HITL<\/p>\n

He notes that as customer expectations now increasingly spiral upwards, we can agree that AI becomes the framework for all IDP services, including agentic human-in-the-loop<\/a> (HITL) deployments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cJust because Abbyy has been doing what we have been doing for 30-35 years (and just because AI has come along today), that track record of document technology knowledge stands us in the best possible ground in terms of being able to roll out AI with a purpose, which means trusted intelligence services with governance and support,\u201d said Persson.<\/p>\n

He thinks that the core capabilities of his firm\u2019s technology include a lot of \u201cconnective tissue\u201d today \u2013 some of which comes from Abbyy and some of which comes from partners \u2013 and this helps create a total platform technology proposition that champions flexibility from ground zero. These, for the Swedish-born CEO, are the factors that help customers move forward in their chosen markets without the fear of vendor lock-in.<\/p>\n

Document bread and butter<\/p>\n

Handing over to one of his core team lynchpins, Persson introduced Bruce Orcutt<\/a>, Abbyy chief marketing officer. Technically competent and affably engaging, the ebullient Orcutt described today\u2019s marketplace for the company and how the firm still focuses on documents as its bread and butter.<\/p>\n

\u201cDocuments have so many different values in different parts of any business, but whatever form they manifest themselves as, they still need management to make them more effective and enable the straight through processing (STP) that they need to be more successful,\u201d said Orcutt. \u201cOur core competency is transforming any piece of content into actionable data \u2013 and much of that happens in real-time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talking about how new technologies are now plugging into the Abbyy platform, the CMO says that trust has been engineered to be baked in from the start. The organistion\u2019s key markets are financial services, healthcare and government\u2026 and with that exacting customer base to serve, the team is focused on evolving core competencies that include:<\/p>\n

Computer vision<\/p>\n

Image enhancement<\/p>\n

Layout analysis<\/p>\n

OCR \/ ICR<\/p>\n

Natural Language Processing (NLP)<\/p>\n

Segmentation<\/p>\n

\u201cNo organisation has seen more documents in more languages in more business scenarios than Abbyy, that\u2019s just a statement of fact,\u201d said Orcutt. \u201cThis means we have a huge span in terms of the compliance stipulations that we know how to work with,\u201d he noted, before inviting users to visit the company\u2019s Trust Portal<\/a> to understand where it meets global compliance standards.<\/p>\n

DocLang, a reliable abstraction layer<\/p>\n

Abbyy Ascend convention saw Abbyy announce news with partners IBM and Red Hat. The organisations have announced the formation of the DocLang working group under the Linux Foundation\u2019s LF AI & Data Foundation. Abbyy says that global industries need a standard document structure for AI in order to address the maelstrom of digital document formats that enterprises operate on, such as PDFs and JPEGs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The companies say that DocLang addresses these critical gaps by creating a reliable abstraction layer between unstructured documents and intelligent AI systems. The standard explicitly preserves both semantic meaning and geometric layout in a single AI-native format and encodes structural elements like headings, paragraphs and tables alongside their exact position on the page.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDocLang is specifically engineered to address industry challenges with a minimal, standardised, and AI-native method for representing document structure, meaning, layout, and governance,\u201d commented Maxime Vermeir, vice president, AI strategy at Abbyy. \u201cBeing designed for efficient machine processing provides a predictable structure optimised for modern AI tokenisation and modelling techniques. Organisations will see a significant difference with more reliable interpretation, reduced hallucinations, and lower computational costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Klososky: Birth of a new \u2018synthetic species\u2019<\/p>\n

This event featured an event speaker session from Scott Klososky<\/a> in his role as technology advocate, author, consultant and founder of Future Point of View.<\/p>\n

Klososky highlighted the huge level of mistrust in AI that exists across North America. Compared to nations like India and China that are positively placing large amounts of trust in the potential for AI to create new job openings, he thinks the trend (at a high level at least) is strange, not least because the USA has control and ownership of so much of the front-line AI services and indeed the data backbone infrastructures that support it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if AI ends up being the most powerful thing we have ever invented,\u201d said Klososky. \u201cWe often talk in terms of synthetic intelligence (AI that is built into software systems) and physical intelligence (AI built into physical devices) and that creates a whole new intelligence layer\u2026 and this might allow us to talk about the birth of a new \u2018synthetic species\u2019, especially with agents now moving us so far along the evolution curve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talking about our next stage in the AI era (and referencing a Sam Altman quote), Klososky thinks that soon enough we\u2019ll see intelligence become subsumed into enterprise software and data services, as a utility, rather like an electricity or water supply.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The question for users now, perhaps, is how much intelligence humans want to take on board. Klososky says that (for example) a pretty smart person might have an IQ of 130, but that person with Claude, Gemeni, ChatGPT, Grok or other on board, becomes a person that might have an IQ of 160. That elevation is something that people have to consider and so do companies i.e. from HR all the way up through an organisation\u2019s departments.<\/p>\n

A DocLang deep dive<\/p>\n

The following editorial section is drawn from an interview with CEO Persson himself.<\/p>\n

Techzine Global: You say that PDFs and JPEGs are \u201cfundamentally misaligned with AI consumption\u201d and are really tools for human eyes, not machine reasoning. Can we quantify how much this misalignment costs business today i.e. do we count the cost of hallucinations, computational overhead, failed automations or some other aspect?<\/p>\n

Ulf Persson: In our benchmarks, we see a clear picture. For example, an LLM processing a PDF for a complex document such as a clinical study packet shows higher compute usage, higher latency and less precisions and accuracy. To that extent, it misses a large part of the table outlining the results. If your submissions to the authorities for approval leverage these results, you can only imagine the cost implications of rectifying that after the fact.<\/p>\n

Techzine Global: DocLang embeds \u201cenforceable governance controls\u201d directly into a document itself \u2013 and this spans privacy, extraction scope and model training permissions. That\u2019s a big dinner plate of controls, is that all as functional and solid as it sounds?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ulf Persson: The DocLang standard describes all these controls, so organisations have a clear template of how to establish compliance with GDPR, ISO 27701 and the EU AI Act (to name a few). By embedding rules directly into the document layer, it ensures privacy, extraction scope, and AI training permissions are upheld wherever the document goes, compared to zero controls in other document formats. This approach secures data at the source, offering enterprises confidence in scaling their document workflows.<\/p>\n

Techzine Global: By open sourcing a format standard rather than keeping it proprietary, some might say that you are \u201cgifting infrastructure\u201d to a broader ecosystem that includes competitors, including AWS and Microsoft \u2013 what \u2018s your rationale and stance on this point?<\/p>\n

Ulf Persson: Standardising document infrastructure drives true interoperability, security, and transparency across the entire enterprise ecosystem. While this allows competitors to use the standard, establishing a universal language accelerates industry innovation and eliminates restrictive vendor lock-in. With the cost of switching quickly eroding to zero, we choose to compete on the measurable business value of our purpose-built AI solutions instead of relying on proprietary format constraints.<\/p>\n

Key takeaways<\/p>\n

The central theme for any Abbyy event is of course, documents and how we use them today. The new work with the Linux Foundation (and IBM + Red Hat) is arguably quite impressive i.e. no other body is likely to attempt to lay down a standard of this kind, so it may well become a de facto layer in the modern enterprise stack. Overall, the fact that the company can draw on more than three decades of data digitisation surely gives it a credible enough track record as we now talk about encoding every part of our world for the agentic engines currently being built.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson has led the Document AI platform company for almost a decade now. He delivered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6178,24,25,201,6179,6180,223,314],"class_list":{"0":"post-6773","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-abbyy","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-cloud","12":"tag-document-ai","13":"tag-document-management","14":"tag-generative-ai","15":"tag-security"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}